Background OCR with ScanSnap / ABBYY FineReader on Mac
I got a Fujitsu ScanSnap 1500M in an attempt to take control of the paper in my life. The software it comes with is tolerable. However, the biggest annoyance is if you set it for automatic OCR, you have to wait for the OCR to finish before you can continue scanning. The scanner is much faster than the OCR, which only uses a single core even on a multi-page document.
It is easy to setup a Finder Folder Action to have the OCR happen automatically in the background so you can continue scanning. The downsides: you must setup a folder action for every folder and you can’t move the PDF until the OCR process is done. Also, the UI for setting up folder actions is crap.
Put the following AppleScript into a file called “OCR.scpt” and put it in “~/Library/Scripts/Folder Action Scripts.” Then right click a folder in the Finder and choose “Folder Actions Setup” and assign this script to any folder which you want incoming PDFs to get OCR’d.
Hacking on Empty 
Update your Finereader software. The inability to scan a document while FineReader was still processing another document was a problem with the version of the software that I received with my 500M scanner. But, I downloaded an update to the ScanSnap version of the software and now I can scan one document after the next and will not receive the usual errors associated with a OCR session already in progress. Just wait until the blue light stops flashing on the scanner before starting the next scan or otherwise you will end up with your documents merged into a single document. My productivity has increased significantly!
Darron
2011/08/31 at 8:45 am